- Hello, my squiggly candles. My name is Mina,
and welcome back. I hope you had a lovely New Year's Eve and New Year's. I celebrated New Year's
Eve for like the first time since 2019, so I feel good. I feel rejuvenated. I'm really excited for
this upcoming year. I'm working on a new project, which I can't wait to show you when it's done,
but, yeah, just very exciting things going on. I am actually in my new space now. I'm debating
what to put here. I feel like it needs like an artwork. I was thinking of putting a curtain
or something, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know. But this white space is
dying to be filled. So let's just jump right into it. Today, we're gonna be talking about
modernism in interior design and a little bit on architecture and why people are redoing their
homes to look greige, which is a portmanteau for gray and beige. I was inspired to do this video
because I came across this TikTok that was then reposted onto Twitter, and there were a lot of
mixed opinions going about it, mostly negative.
- [TikTokker] I'm sorry, this has to be
addressed. How? How did this become this become this become this?
- This is not the first home renovation video I've seen where someone has deliberately removed
all the old history of a building and turned it into this like Alcatraz-chic style. On the higher
end of this interior aesthetic is Kim Kardashian's infamous house that is very beige and cream. She
and Kanye West have kind of lived this way for a while, but post-divorce, she did another in-house
interview with Vogue, which reignited criticism towards her interior tastes. In the video, she
features a few rooms in her 15,000-square-foot gigantic mansion - the kitchen, the sitting
room, which are both incredibly minimal and monochromatic, with literally no personal items
anywhere, minus the select few that she talks about in the video, and then her basketball court
and three of her cars, which also purposely match her house. About her house, she tells Vogue...
- I want it to be just really quiet, and I want everything to feel calming. It's
like each kid can have their full style and taste in their bedroom and have so much fun. But
in the main house, I really like the calmness. - So in terms of the negative viewpoints, people
said that it looked soulless, it looked cold, unwelcoming, like a prison or a psych ward,
but there were also a lot of commenters saying that it was a sophisticated house. It was
elegant and classic and clean. Personally, I lean more towards maximalism than
minimalism. So I don't love clutter, but I prefer a house that looks lived in, that has
interesting objects around it, and that has color. My impression of Kim's house is that it looks a
bit like a museum. I think it's very clean. There is no doubt that it's incredibly elegant and that
it costs like probably a shit-ton of money to redo it and transform it into what it is today. But I
personally know myself, and I know that I would be very depressed if I was like cooped up there
during the pandemic or something. I would just not wanna spend that much time at home. I also
have black cats, so I just know that the cream color scheme would not work for me. There would be
black hair everywhere. Very un-chic. Regardless, it clearly works for some people. So I wanna
dive into that, but first I need to take a break. For the past week, my favorite way to spend a
quick downtime during the workday has been to play Two Dots, which is a puzzle game that's free
to download on iOS and Android. They also are a sponsor for today's video. Two Dots is pretty
popular. They have over 115 million downloads globally, and you can definitely tell why. I
really like the game's minimalistic design, the relaxing music, and the fact that you
can play at your own pace without worrying about a clock. It's just a very simple design
without all the unnecessary clutter that you usually get from a free app. They also have
other games within the game. For example, weekly events like the Scavenger Hunt,
where you have to find the items on a map, kind of like "Where's Waldo?". This is my
favorite side game. But they also have a game called Treasure Hunt, where you need to complete
seven special levels to unlock unique rewards. Download Two Dots using the link in my description
so you can play today. Thank you, Two Dots. It's no surprise that in our Western society, a
lot of people consider neutrals to be very classy and elegant and timeless, not just for interior
design, but also for clothing, for product design, literally anything. There's something about beige,
white, gray, and black that has Western society in its chokehold. So why is that? I trace it back to
ancient Greece. Well, not really. I trace it back to excavations of ancient Greek statues. If you
go to any art museum that has a Greco-Roman statue exhibit, you'll notice that these figures are
beautifully crafted, made of marble, and super, super, super pale. These are always my favorite
exhibits of any museum, because I'm a basic bitch, and I just think of that one scene in "Pride
and Prejudice" when Keira Knightley is wandering around the statues and looking at all the
beautiful busts, and I envision myself as that. But the problem with these exhibits is that
it leads to this misconception that Greek statues were just these white marble statues, when really,
in reality, they were polychromatic, which means they were originally all elaborately painted.
And the reason they're not anymore is because, over time, the paint has worn off. The New Yorker
published a piece a few years ago called "The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture", and
in it, they talked to Mark Abbe, who is a Professor of Ancient Art at the University of
Georgia. In 2000, Abbe was a graduate student at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts,
and was working at an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, which is in
present-day Turkey. A little bit of info about Aphrodisias - it was a metropolis of art until
about the 7th century, CE, when an earthquake destroyed the place. But in 1961, archeologists
began excavating the city. When Abbe was there, he noticed there were some traces of colors in the
excavated relics. There was some red pigment in the lips, black pigment in the hair. Archeologists
and museum curators have always found traces of color in these statues, but for centuries, they
were scrubbing them away before presenting these statues to the public. This was a practice since
the Renaissance era, when these statues were first getting their mainstream revival. So why did they
scrub-a-dub-dub? Oftentimes, art restorers and dealers vigorously scrub these objects to enhance
their memorial gleam and their collectibility. But also, for a while, scholars wanted to
believe something that fit in line with their own political ideologies. For example, in the
18th century, German scholar Johann Winckelmann contended that "the whiter the body is, the more
beautiful it is," and that "color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty." When the ancient
Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were first excavated in the mid-18th century, Winckelmann
did notice traces of color in these statues. But he first claimed that a statue of Artemis with
red hair, red sandals, and a red quiver strap must have not been Greek but Etruscan, and,
at the time, Etruscans were considered a less sophisticated earlier civilization. Historian Nell
Irvin Painter writes in her book "The History of White People" that Winckelmann was a Eurocentrist
who depreciated people of other nationalities, like the Chinese or the Kalmyk. She writes,
"Color and sculpture came to mean barbarism, for they assumed that the lofty ancient Greeks
were too sophisticated to color their art." Late 18th century writer Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe similarly declared that "savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great
predilection for vivid colors." He also noted that "people of refinement avoid vivid colors in
their dress and the objects that are about them." During the 20th century, we also saw the birth of
the modernist movement, which also championed the abstraction of white forms. Pioneer of modern
architecture Le Corbusier even wrote in an essay in 1928 titled "Purism", "Let us leave to
the clothes-dyers the sensory jubilation of the paint tube." On the fascist fronts of Italy and
Germany, nationalist artists were creating these white marble statues that represented what they
determined as the idealized body. In the 1930s, ancient Greek ideals were fusing together with the
Aryan myth, and fascists were even claiming that ancient Greeks were Nordic people. At the 1937
opening of the House of German Art in Munich, there was a parade that featured "ancient
Germans", who were just dressed as ancient Greeks. In Italy, Mussolini was also very
involved in creating architectural structures that were reminiscent of ancient Rome so as
to signal the genius of the Roman Empire and build nationalistic fervor for modern day
Italy. And even today, fascists continue to co-op Greco-Roman sculptures to further their own
political agendas. For example, white nationalist group Identity Europa started putting up posters
on college campuses that presented classical white marble statues as emblems of white nationalism.
Xenophobic writer Gregory Hood also argued that bringing back classical architectural style for
federal buildings would be "one small step towards reuniting white Americans with our civilizational
tradition." He further said that "other forms of architecture reinforce an idea of a racial
deracination" and "alienate white people from their past" in order to "make them feel helpless,
rootless, and weak". Oh brother, this guy stinks! I'm getting a little off topic here, but what I'm
trying to say is that the whitewashing of Greek and Roman statues has led to untrue beliefs of
what Greek and Roman society actually was at the time. The reality is that the Roman Empire was
very diverse. Ancient sources note that there was a variety of skin tones, and if we look at
excavated - or that hasn't been whitewashed, then we can see how artists also tried to translate
that skin tone across their work. For example, when looking at the Fayum portraits, which were
near-life-size portraits that were painted on funerary objects, these portraits portray a
range of skin tones from olive green to deep brown. So in the 1990s, Vinzenz Brinkmann and
Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann began recreating Greek and Roman sculptures in plaster, painting them with
an approximation of their original colors. The resulting work is a series of sculptures called
"Gods in Color", which officially launched in 2003 and has been shown all over the world. Throughout
the exhibition, the color replicas are juxtaposed with white plaster casts of marble pieces,
fakes that look like what we think of as the real thing. So I live in New York City, and I've
gone to the Met a couple times, and in the Met, they actually have a couple of these reproduction
statues. And let me tell you, my first impression seeing them was that they looked really gaudy and
just very weird, because my brain is so used to seeing white marble. So seeing this was just like
very off-putting. I also think that the opacity of the paint that they used kind of lends itself to
look cheaper, because when we think of something that's very opaque and flat, we think of plastic
and cheap materials. Abbe also agrees with me, or maybe I should say I agree with Abbe, but when
asked for his opinion on the exhibit, he said that "the hues are too flat and opaque, and the
plaster, which most of the replicas are made from, absorbs paint in a way that marble does not." So
I also think it's really important to recognize that these reconstructions are not exact replica.
They're estimations, because we'll never really know for sure what something would've looked
like, exactly. But speaking of color, last year, the Science Museum Group Collection published
a newsletter that got a lot of traction. In it, they examined over 7,000 household objects in
their museum and created a graph that shows how the color of objects have changed over time. As
you can see, according to their data, there's been a rise in gray over time, and a decline in brown
and yellow. Part of the reason why objects are grayer is because of the change in materials used.
If we look at this telegraph from 1844 versus the iPhone 3G mobile phone, which came out in like
2008, the colors from the telegraph are a result of using mahogany wood. The telegraph's rounded
pillars also reflect light and create shadows, and its age lends to color variation. But even
with the change in materials, in the mid-century, object colors were way more saturated. And in
terms of phones, there was a broader range of colors up until the 1980s. The gray began in the
late 1980s, with the introduction of the brick phone. As for interiors, we've had colorful
interior options for a long time now. Thomas Jefferson famously painted the dining room of his
Monticello estate chrome yellow. But with that said, most color organizations for paints didn't
exist until the 1960s. In the 1950s and '60s, the universal tinting colors for house paints
consisted of oil-based earth pigments or clays. So ochres, siennas, and umbers made from iron oxide.
Paints of this era were luminous and slightly transparent. But unfortunately, these paints also
contained high levels of VOCs, which are volatile organic compounds, which were later deemed to be
pollutants and cancer-causing. In 2011, the first waterborne oil finish enamel was introduced as
a viable alternative to these oil-based enamels, and, environmentally, they were a much safer
option. The only issue was an aesthetic issue, in the sense that these paints looked duller,
looked flatter, and more opaque. So as you can imagine, beige and gray paints of today are even
more lifeless than they ever were before. So with that said, why do people make this choice to
paint with neutrals? Tash Bradley, Director of Interior Design at Lick, a UK-based wallpaper
and paint brand, theorizes that the hustle and bustle of pre-pandemic life likely caused the
gray-on-gray trend. She says, "You go out and are so overstimulated so that when you come home,
you just want to shut the door and have peace and a soft, calm home," similar to what Kim Kardashian
told Vogue. And I think there's a point in saying that a lot of us spend a lot of time online now,
and we're so overexposed to color and saturation on screens, so that when we inevitably log off
and put our phones away, we just don't have the stamina anymore to appreciate colors of the
natural environment. This is just my hypothesis, like, there's no scientific study that I know
of that backs that, but it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? But does gray really make you feel
calm? According to Tash, who also is a trained color psychologist, "Gray is soulless. It honestly
drains you. When I wake up in London and it's gray outside, all I wanna do is pull the duvet over my
head and go back to sleep." I think, regardless of how beige and gray make us feel personally, there
is this common consensus around Western society that grays, beiges, neutrals in general are
elegant, classy, timeless, as I said before. Part of that goes back to our misconception of ancient
Greece and their elegant white marble statues, but also, in contemporary society, there are just so
many articles that are like "How to Dress Classy", "How to Dress Professionally", "How to Dress
Wealthy", and there's always, always, always an emphasis on wearing neutrals. This is a major
switch from mid-19th century thinking, which was that if you were wearing neutrals, it was because
you couldn't afford dyed clothing. But nowadays, neutrals, and beige, in particular, represent
this idea that you are comfortable in who you are and that you don't need to draw attention to
yourself. Also, design and construction are more apparent when you look at a neutral piece. The
garment can't hide behind a colorful pattern to distract from its cheap fabric or poor tailoring.
There's also a sense of like pureness in neutral tones. Neutral tones act as blank canvases, which
is especially profitable if you're trying to sell a house. People who flip houses are not trying to
design a house that they personally would wanna live in. They're trying to design a house that
could entice as many people as possible. It's much easier to look at a blank space and conceptualize
how you would decorate it, rather than looking at a space that's colorful and mismatched and
has its own personality as a starting point. Most of the interior design that we see today
and that we also have gripes about stem from the school of modernism. Modernism started roughly
at the turn of the 20th century, and its core idea was that the world had to be fundamentally
redesigned. Especially after World War I and the Russian Revolution, some philosophers
believed that the human condition could be healed by new approaches to art and design. Economic
inequality was central to the modernist agenda, and architects devoted a lot of energy into
designing affordable housing that met the needs of the interwar period. To do so, modern architects
tried to industrialize the building process, experimenting with new construction techniques,
such as steel, concrete, and glass that could reduce costs and allow for mass production.
Modernism placed an emphasis on the technological and the essential in architecture. Because
this made housing construction cheaper, it's no surprise that these types of buildings grew
in demand. As the editors for n+1 magazine write, "If it's cheaper to assemble concrete panels than
to hire bricklayers, cityscapes will eventually contain fewer bricks." The unromantic aspect
of this agenda is that a lot of these artists and designers started to think of the world as
a machine. So a house was a machine to live in, and art was not to adorn life, but organize it.
Around the same time, Henry Ford's assembly lines inspired mechanization and high productivity
rates. In design, modernism thus centered around sleek clean lines and prioritized usefulness
over embellishment. Fast forward to the 1990s, when politicians and real estate developers
tried to encourage white people to move back into the cities that they had once fled a la white
flight. By the 2000s, to keep up with these rising populations, infill housing started to crop up.
There was a pause in 2008 during the recession, but afterwards, the low interest rates of the
time enabled developers to build these cheap, monocultural, ugly buildings all over America
today. Part of the monotony is also because developers were trying to circumvent these long
community approval processes for new designs, and instead, just basically copy-and-pasted
already-approved designs. n+1 magazine called this movement "cardboard modernism".
"Buildings are less ambitious, less humane, and uglier than anyone deserves. They're also
really gray." Nowadays, if you live anywhere, but especially if you live in a city like New
York, you'll notice all over StreetEasy and Zillow are these extremely soulless and ugly apartment
units being listed in gentrifying neighborhoods. For that reason, I'm personally calling this
design choice "gentrifier-core". Amanda Mull wrote about the notable characteristics of these
buildings for The Atlantic, "These floors - almost always made of what's called 'luxury vinyl plank
flooring' in trade terms, or laminate or fake wood in real terms, can vary in shade anywhere from
vape cloud to wet gravel. Other elements include a subway-tiled backsplash, upper kitchen cabinets
replaced with minimalist open shelving, a shower stall covered in tiny multi-colored sheets of
glass mosaic tile, a barn door gliding along the faux-rustic decorative track instead of turning
on hinges." Why are these features so ubiquitous in new properties? Much of the '90s and early
2000s home interior centered around all-white appliances, dingy carpets, and warm-toned wood
cabinetry. So the easiest way to update a house or apartment, so to speak, is to do the complete
reversal of those things, resulting in gray, cool-toned, and geometric interiors. Other markers
of 2010s' newness accentuate the same baseline minimal traits, from Apple products to mid-century
modern IKEA furniture. Millennials, the current apartment-renting, house-buying market, clearly
have aligned themselves with minimalism, maybe in their plight to be more environmentally cautious,
or at least to seem like it, or to appear spiritually superior in a pseudo-Buddhist kind
of way, but that's another topic. But in general, we like to buy a house that's new, because
newness implies that things aren't broken. Nothing needs to be fixed. No leaky roofs. No
creaky floorboards. All the windows are working. Essentially, it means little to no maintenance
starting costs, and an immediate move-in. However, as most renters in urban cities know, just because
something looks new does not mean it actually is new, or functional, for that matter. My boyfriend
used to live in this apartment, and when he moved into it, it was marketed as "newly-renovated".
One part of these renovations is that the landlord had painted all the wood floors a gray wall
paint. Not even a wood paint; a wall paint. And the reason? So that, in the photos, it looked
cleaner, I guess, and more light came in because, you know, lighter colors attract more light from
the outside. He also did it as a shortcut so that he wouldn't have to pay the exorbitant cost of
re-flooring the entire place. But, in the end, it was just a cosmetic band-aid that made cleaning
the floors a truly, truly inconvenient process. As Mull writes, "Is open shelving really a chic,
minimalist alternative to bulky upper cabinets, or is it just much less expensive than replacing
the old, outdated uppers that the demo guys ripped out? Tiny mosaic glass tiles look delicate,
but they come in sheets that make quick work of a bathroom and can help disguise a multitude
of installation sins. Laminate flooring is much cheaper than hardwood, and considerably less
repairable and adaptable. Unlike real wood, luxury vinyl can't be refinished in another
color when trends change." While we can at least admit that Kim Kardashian's greige home
looks modern and elegant, albeit unwelcoming, the poorer man's version, gentrifier-core, is
anything but modern or elegant. It's merely a co-option, just like a nod to the real thing,
in the same way that Shein is a nod to Gucci sometimes. Because even though modernism
had foundations in fixing social inequality, to have a truly beautiful modern home is a rich
person thing. Like, I can't even imagine how many housekeepers Kim Kardashian must employ
to make sure there's not one speck of dust on her cream floors. There's another trend in
Zillow listings called virtual staging. It's essentially when real estate agents post photos
of interiors with furniture that isn't real. Why do they do this? Because it's a common belief
that a house that's staged with furniture is more likely to sell than a house that has nothing in
it. In ye olden days, homeowners would actually hire people to select the furniture, move
the furniture in, out, and around the place, and take well-lit photographs. It's expensive
and requires way more people. So virtual staging has become the cheaper alternative solution. But
McMansion Hell, an architecture and urban design commentary blog, explains the result of virtual
staging. "Virtual staging works well because the softness of overlit white and gray walls enables
the fuzzy edges of the renderings to look natural when mixed with an over-stylized reality. If you
look at virtual staging in a non-neutral house, it looks immediately plastic and out of place,
which is why many realtors opt to either still stage using furniture or leave the place empty."
With this understanding, it's clearly more cost-efficient to sell a bland neutral space than
to sell a house with even a smidge of personality. Will these greige interiors end, or will we be
destined to live in a concrete block for the rest of time? I actually have really positive
thoughts about this, because interior design, much like fashion, operates in trend cycles.
For example, in the 1970s, we saw the birth of post-modernism, that championed theatrical
and visually-stimulating design choices. One of these groups, the Memphis Group, was popular for
designing colorful furniture and home objects that are childlike and playful. I also really think
it's important to have perspective and realize that a lot of what I'm talking about, these
modernist trends, are popular among real estate developers and celebrities. Most normal people
still live in houses that are full of knickknacks and history. The reason being is that it's just
way more expensive to renovate a house and keep up with interior design trends than it is to, you
know, buy a new wardrobe whenever a fashion trend happens. So generally, unless you have a ton of
money, or if you're buying a house marketed as new, you're likely not gonna participate in every
single interior design trend that comes and goes. Also, with Gen Z and their penchant for maximalism
and cluttercore, the tide is definitely turning. I did a video already, talking about Gen Z's
maximalism, so I won't go further into that, but also, lockdown. During lockdown, so many
people took on DIY painting, home decor. I think a lot of people were just really tired
of looking at their gray walls all day. From mid-2020 to mid-2021, Google reported a 250%
increase in searches for DIY accent wall ideas, and searches for best interior paint reached an
all-time high. Backdrop co-founder Natalie Ebel weighed in, "The past year helped us realize the
versatility of our spaces. For a lot of people, this was the first time they painted the
walls of their homes - and as for most things, the first time is always the biggest hurdle. Now
that they realize how attainable and affordable it is to transform a space with just a coat of
paint, this increased frequency and creativity will continue and expand." So I think the pendulum
is definitely swinging. It'll just be interesting to see how this plays out in the future, because
Gen Z, as it stands, are still very young. They're definitely not the market that's looking to
buy houses. So we're not really seeing this aesthetic change in the way that houses are
marketed. But it'll be interesting, that once a certain amount of time passes, whether or
not developers will try to appeal to this new generation or if they'll just continue doing
whatever's cheapest. So this is the end of the video. Thank you so much for tuning in. I would
love to hear what your thoughts about this are, and whether you think there will be the end of
greige, or if you think the power of greige will continue. I hope you have a lovely rest of
your day, and I'll see you next time. Bye! And don't forget to download Two Dots
by clicking the link in my description.
